Call it a "brick," or "not a real laptop," or whatever else you please. But the fact remains that Google's Chromebook is going places. That's (at least partly) because Google has recently signed an agreement with VMware (NYSE:VMW-Free Report) that greatly increases its functionality.

One of the major disadvantages of this cloud-based, ridiculously cheap device was its inability to run legacy software that is usually based on Microsoft's (Nasdaq:MSFT-Free Report) Windows platform. Now, using VMware's Blast HTML5 technology, which is available as a Web-based app on Chromebooks, users can access all this stuff.

The plan is to make this service ultimately available to all as a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. Google believes it will enable companies to save $5,000 per computer (compared to traditional PCs).

This basically means that the device that no one thought would succeed beyond a very cost-conscious consumer has now become extremely useful for cost-conscious corporates. Suddenly, Microsoft's "Scroogled" ads targeting the Chromebook make sense.

Investors Punish Cisco Shares

While Cisco managed to beat earnings and revenue expectations for their fiscal second quarter and also provided earnings guidance above our expectations, shares took a tumble following the announcement.

Cisco's challenges do make a big pile – broad-based move toward cloud-computing that reduce demand for its hardware (routers, switches), a transition to mobile devices that again reduce demand for networking hardware, conservative enterprise spending given the continued market uncertainties, emerging market weakness stemming from distrust in government spying tactics and strengthening competition from Huawei in Asia and Juniper (NYSE:JNPR-Free Report) in the U.S.

But Cisco does appear to have met its own expectations thus far, so there is every chance it will remain on track to meet its own expectations of a recovery in the fiscal fourth quarter 2014/first quarter 2015 timeframe. The company expects to have its new products in the market by then.

Management is also very optimistic about the Internet of Things, which is expected to be the next big wave bringing Cisco back in the game. Considering the way it has tackled the market in the past, the long-term story should play out.

To pacify investors in the meantime, Cisco raised the quarterly dividend by a couple of cents.

Android Apps for Windows?

Some rumors do good things to share prices and some not so good. Last week, there was a rumor reported by The Verge that Microsoft, in a hurry to get its devices more popular with users, could allow Android apps to run on the Windows platform.

Companies seeking to build their own eco systems have to make solid hardware and give it time for adoption. Because usually, users are not attracted to hardware that does not come with their favorite apps. On the other hand, developers generally avoid platforms that do not have a lot of users. Microsoft could have given this some time if it wasn't for the fact that it's a very late entrant into a fiercely competitive market. Microsoft could definitely do with a spike in hardware sales (its tablet business is yet to make a profit).

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While not quite mainstream yet, WebRTC is starting to gain ground with Carriers, Enterprises and Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) alike. WebRTC makes it easy for developers to add audio and video communications into their applications by using Web browsers as their platform. But like any market, every customer engagement has unique requirements, as well as constraints. And of course, one size does not fit all.
In her session at WebRTC Summit, Dr. Natasha Tamaskar, Vice President, Head of C...

Sematext is a globally distributed organization that builds innovative Cloud and On Premises solutions for performance monitoring, alerting and anomaly detection (SPM), log management and analytics (Logsene), and search analytics (SSA). We also provide Search and Big Data consulting services and offer 24/7 production support for Solr and Elasticsearch.

The speed of software changes in growing and large scale rapid-paced DevOps environments presents a challenge for continuous testing. Many organizations struggle to get this right. Practices that work for small scale continuous testing may not be sufficient as the requirements grow.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Marc Hornbeek, Sr. Solutions Architect of DevOps continuous test solutions at Spirent Communications, will explain the best practices of continuous testing at high scale, which is r...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Emcien will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Emcien’s vision is to let anyone use data to know the future. Emcien has built an automated, predictive analysis product that improves the lives of real people. Emcien allows people to automate their data analysis so they can build a better future.

DevOps is all the rage these days and with good reason as it promises to reduce the time-to-market for new applications. It also promises to improve change management, allowing teams to deploy changes to their applications quickly and efficiently. However, DevOps isn’t something you buy, install, or implement; rather it is the symptom of an appropriate organizational system.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Mark Thiele, EVP, Data Center Technologies at SUPERNAP International, will discuss how ...

Hosted PaaS providers have given independent developers and startups huge advantages in efficiency and reduced time-to-market over their more process-bound counterparts in enterprises. Software frameworks are now available that allow enterprise IT departments to provide these same advantages for developers in their own organization.
In his workshop session at DevOps Summit, Troy Topnik, ActiveState’s Technical Product Manager, will show how on-prem or cloud-hosted Private PaaS can enable organ...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Litmus Automation will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
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The world's leading Cloud event, Cloud Expo has launched Microservices Journal on the SYS-CON.com portal, featuring over 19,000 original articles, news stories, features, and blog entries.
DevOps Journal is focused on this critical enterprise IT topic in the world of cloud computing.
Microservices Journal offers top articles, news stories, and blog posts from the world's well-known experts and guarantees better exposure for its authors than any other publication.
Follow new article posts on T...

Internet of Things (IoT) will be a hybrid ecosystem of diverse devices and sensors collaborating with operational and enterprise systems to create the next big application.
In their session at @ThingsExpo, Bramh Gupta, founder and CEO of robomq.io, and Fred Yatzeck, principal architect leading product development at robomq.io, will discuss how choosing the right middleware and integration strategy from the get-go will enable IoT solution developers to adapt and grow with the industry, while at...

SYS-CON Events announced today the IoT Bootcamp – Jumpstart Your IoT Strategy, being held June 9–10, 2015, in conjunction with 16th Cloud Expo and Internet of @ThingsExpo at the Javits Center in New York City. This is your chance to jumpstart your IoT strategy.
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Even though it’s now Microservices Journal, long-time fans of SOA World Magazine can take comfort in the fact that the URL – soa.sys-con.com – remains unchanged. And that’s no mistake, as microservices are really nothing more than a new and improved take on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) best practices we struggled to hammer out over the last decade. Skeptics, however, might say that this change is nothing more than an exercise in buzzword-hopping. SOA is passé, and now that people are ...

With the arrival of the Big Data revolution, a data professional is expected to master a broad spectrum of complex domains including data processing, mathematics, programming languages, machine learning techniques, and business knowledge. While this mastery is undoubtedly important, this narrow focus on tool usage has divorced many from the imagination required to solve real-world problems. As the demand for analysis increases, the data science community must transform from tool experts to "data...

SYS-CON Events announced today that the DevOps Institute has been named “Association Sponsor” of SYS-CON's DevOps Summit, which will take place on June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
The DevOps Institute provides enterprise level training and certification. Working with thought leaders from the DevOps community, the IT Service Management field and the IT training market, the DevOps Institute is setting the standard in quality for DevOps education and training.

SYS-CON Events announced today the DevOps Foundation Certification Course, being held June ?, 2015, in conjunction with DevOps Summit and 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
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Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices
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If you have a Network Operations Center (or NOC, as the kids call it), you have a skilled set of eyes monitoring your system and alerting your engineers when things go wrong. (If you have something like a NOC, such as a first tier team that processes tickets, we’re looking at you, too). You also probably have strict SLAs and a need for high availability at all times. You can’t waste a second when ...

In recent years, we’ve watched mobile, cloud technologies and Internet of Things (IoT) enable increased connectivity for every network and every industry, ranging from connected cars to commercial vehicles and fleet management to smart cities to data centers. At MWC, it was clear that professionals in these areas are continuing to make strides in their fields. Below are a few of the major developm...

DevOps is all the rage these days and with good reason as it promises to reduce the time-to-market for new applications. It also promises to improve change management, allowing teams to deploy changes to their applications quickly and efficiently. However, DevOps isn’t something you buy, install, or implement; rather it is the symptom of an appropriate organizational system.
In his session at De...

When it comes to microservices there are myths and uncertainty about the journey ahead. Deploying a “Hello World” app on Docker is a long way from making microservices work in real enterprises with large applications, complex environments and existing organizational structures. February 19, 2015 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET → 45 Minutes Join our four experts: Special host Gene Kim, Gary Gruver, Randy Sh...

You deployed an app. Nothing has changed in three days, but it suddenly crashes. Why? Memory leak.
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You deployed a load balancing service. N...

Recent announcements from Google about the future of Glass naturally ignited an explosion of commentary in the tech media. For those of us in the Glass at Work world, the news that Glass has “graduated” from Google[x] into a true business unit headed by Tony Fadell is very promising. Yet many outlets’ coverage focused on the end of the Glass Explorer program for consumers, characterizing it as the...

This month I want to revisit supporting infrastructure and datacenter environments. I have touched (some would say rant) upon this topic since my post in April 2014 called "Take a Holistic View of Support". My thoughts and views on this topic have not changed at all: it's critical for any organization to have a holistic, comprehensive strategy and view of how they support their IT infrastructure a...

For me the mantra of achieving speed via automation tools is nothing new. In fact I was ‘automating’ Citrix Metaframe builds using windows scripting techniques back in 2004. The market though, has become awash with different automation products and it’s fair to say that many enterprises now suffer from ‘automation sprawl’. This results in a tactical rather than the strategic approach to automation...

It's spring in the Northeast, and this week we're launching a new blog post series, "Everything You Want to Know about Windows Server 2003 Migration." Why a series of posts on WS2003? Even as summer and EOS is just months away, our "State of Readiness for Windows Server 2003 End of Support" survey reveals the shocking truth: most of you haven't done anything about remediation yet, and most will no...

Keeping data from getting out into the wild or being damaged by cyber attackers is what keeps CISOs, the executive team and boards of directors up at night. To protect organizations, cybersecurity needs to be automated and real-time, it needs to learn contextually like we do and it needs to monitor every corner of the network in a way that organizations can afford without sacrificing coverage.

Even though it’s now Microservices Journal, long-time fans of SOA World Magazine can take comfort in the fact that the URL – soa.sys-con.com – remains unchanged. And that’s no mistake, as microservices are really nothing more than a new and improved take on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) best practices we struggled to hammer out over the last decade. Skeptics, however, might say that this...

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Combined with real-world scenarios and use cases, the IoT Bootcamp is not just based on presentations but includes hands-on demos and wal...

While recently attending a Dynatrace User Group in Hartford, I had the opportunity to sit in on a great presentation from a leading US insurance company as they explained their three-year APM journey. I see a lot of these success stories, but this one was especially impressive. To see how they have refined their internal processes, successes and performance best practices to ensure delivery of hig...

Microservice architectures are the new hotness, even though they aren't really all that different (in principle) from the paradigm described by SOA (which is dead, or not dead, depending on whom you ask). One of the things this decompositional approach to application architecture does is encourage developers and operations (some might even say DevOps) to re-evaluate scaling strategies. In particul...

Microservices are the result of decomposing applications. That may sound a lot like SOA, but SOA was based on an object-oriented (noun) premise; that is, services were built around an object - like a customer - with all the necessary operations (functions) that go along with it. SOA was also founded on a variety of standards (most of them coming out of OASIS) like SOAP, WSDL, XML and UDDI. Microse...

Right off the bat, Newman advises that we should "think of microservices as a specific approach for SOA in the same way that XP or Scrum are specific approaches for Agile Software development". These analogies are very interesting because my expectation was that microservices is a pattern. So I might infer that microservices is a set of process techniques as opposed to an architectural approach. Y...

You hear the terms “subscription economy” and “subscription commerce” all the time. And with good reason. Subscription-based monetization is transforming business as we know it. But what about usage? Where’s the “consumption economy”? Turns out, it’s all around us.
When most people think of usage-based billing, the example that probably comes to mind first is metered public utilities — water, g...

Our guest on the podcast this week is Jesse Proudman, Founder and CTO of Bluebox. We discuss Walmart’s recent OpenStack success story and the expanding capabilities of DIY private clouds. While DIY private clouds require large investments in configuring open source software to meet business needs, they can have several advantages over managed services alternatives. Listen in to learn how a DIY mod...

As a group of concepts, DevOps has converged on several prominent themes including continuous software delivery, automation, and configuration management (CM). These integral pieces often form the pillars of an organization’s DevOps efforts, even as other bigger pieces like overarching best practices and guidelines are still being tried and tested. Being that DevOps is a relatively new paradigm - ...

There's a lot of focus on the performance of mobile communications given the incredible rate at which mobile is outpacing legacy PC (did you ever think we'd see the day when we called it that?) usage. There's been tons of research on the topic ranging from the business impact (you really can lose millions of dollars per second of delay) to the technical mechanics of how mobile communications is im...

The competition among public cloud providers is red hot, private cloud continues to grab increasing shares of IT budgets, and hybrid cloud strategies are beginning to conquer the enterprise IT world.

Big Data is driving dramatic leaps in resource requirements and capabilities, and now the Internet of Things promises an exponential leap in the size of the Internet and Worldwide Web.

The world of SDX now encompasses Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDCs) as the technology world prepares for the Zettabyte Age.

Add the key topics of WebRTC and DevOps into the mix, and you have three days of pure cloud computing that you simply cannot miss.

Cloud Expo - the world's most established event - offers a vast selection of 130+ technical and strategic Industry Keynotes, General Sessions, Breakout Sessions, and signature Power Panels. The exhibition floor features 100+ exhibitors offering specific solutions and comprehensive strategies. The floor also features two Demo Theaters that give delegates the opportunity to get even closer to the technology they want to see and the people who offer it.

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